It took two months, but it finally happened: I was in the same room as Björk. It was bound to happen eventually, given that Reykjavík is barely larger than Ann Arbor, MI. But in my imagination, the Iceland that Björk exists in can’t possibly be the same one where I live my daily life. If I was to see her shopping for groceries at Bónus it would shatter that illusion entirely, so thankfully the circumstances of this encounter still had an appropriate level of mystique. Apparently, on every full moon, Björk plays a DJ set at the record store Smekkleysa, which was founded by The Sugarcubes. She promotes it to her 2.2 million followers on Instagram, but since only a tiny fraction of them live in Iceland it draws a manageable crowd for an in-store performance. So. Much. Fun.
Overall, it was a big music week with the Extreme Chill experimental music festival spanning 5 of the last 7 days. Now in it’s 16th year, the program was held at venues all over town and my favorite sets were by Patricia Wolf, Seefeel, R-O-R, and Drew McDowall.
There was also a film screening of Hrafnamynd by Edward Pack Davee, who lived in Iceland as a child when his father was stationed at the now-closed NATO base. The through-line of the film is about his memories of that time, formed and influenced by slide photography of his childhood, combined with numerous return trips to Iceland as an adult. It’s a beautiful portrait of early-70s Iceland, ravens, and the limits of memory. Patricia Wolf did the soundtrack and performed live ahead of the screening.
Walking near the harbor yesterday I noticed a unique vessel called the Tara Polar Station docked behind Harpa. I looked it up and found a good article that describes how it can withstand -52°C temperatures and provide living accommodations for 18 people. It’s first real expedition starts next year, which will last 18 months, including 14 months drifting in sea ice. That’s a pretty tight environment for 18 people to spend over a year stuck in the ice!
The research station will be docked in Reykjavík through October 20th, long enough to play a role in the upcoming Arctic Circle Assembly, which I’ll be attending. I hope to learn more about it during that event, and maybe find a way to get an onboard tour.
With the arrival of September the days are getting noticeably shorter here. The Sun Graph indicates that only now does Reykjavík have true “Night,” previously only reaching “Astronomical Twilight.”
One side effect is that it’s dark enough now to see aurora, and the last week had enough solar weather for me to spot the Northern Lights. There’s obviously light pollution from the city, so they were pretty faint with the naked eye, but the long exposures on an iPhone let you to see what’s hiding in the darkness.
In general, the sky was very impressive this week. Here are a couple more examples:
The final thing I’ll point out this week is a fun website called The True Size where you can move countries (or US states) around a typical Mercator map projection to see how they compare. We all know that map projections are distorted, but a tool like this really helps to show how dramatic those distortions are as you reach the poles.
Funny enough for me, since I know these places so well, Iceland is roughly the size of both Pennsylvania and the lower peninsula of Michigan.
Noted & Done
- I watched Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night, an Icelandic film based on the novel by Jón Kalman Stefánsson. It’s my favorite of the three books I’ve read by him, and despite finishing it over 2.5 years ago the movie brought back imagery from the book so vividly that at times it felt like I’d watched it before. Unlike many Icelandic films, this one is easily accessible; it’s available to rent or purchase on Amazon Prime.
- I’m planning a trip to the Westfjords in a couple of weeks for a long weekend. If you’ve been, and have recommendations, let me know! I plan to stay in Patreksfjörður and Flateyri.
- Wikipedia tells me that 81% of Icelanders never smoke, but I guess I go to a lot of the same places as those 19%. I find smoking to be noticeably more common here, or maybe it’s just that there isn’t the courtesy of standing 10+ feet away from an entrance, so I end up walking through smoke more often.
- I had to wrangle with all kinds of problems on the Moped Army website this week. I guess it’s par for the course, but running a website in 2025 is an especially unforgiving chore. The site gets hammered by unscrupulous AI bots scraping the forum to build their models, search engine traffic is down because Google just serves AI answers instead of sending people to the site, and the lack of traffic combined with plummeting ad rates means revenue is cut in half. I’ve been running the site for 28 years now, and the amount of time I have to spend fending off attacks, scammers, and other bad actors is much higher now than any point in the past. I’ll keep on keeping on, but all of these additional headaches don’t bode well for the health and longevity of the independent web.